Introduction

Education is not a consumer product. It is an attitude, a philosophy, a way of life. An institute of learning cannot be merely an information delivery system; learning is not a passive reception of knowledge. Learning is about critical engagement with the materials, and about learning and interacting with your peers and other members of the requisite insitutions. The Antiquity of Man website has been operating since 07 July 1999 and showcases past and current academic thinking, research projects and debates to illustrate how archaeological facts cannot speak for themselves.

The best introductory summary on the nature and value of archaeology was written by a former professor of mine, Andrew B. Smith, in 1996 and is reproduced as follows:

Material remains are
marshalled, compared and manipulated by scholars who are active
participants operating within their own social contexts to support
mutually inclusive and exclusive hypotheses of past behavioural
patterns. The archaeological record is malleable, although we can
accept that a cattle bone is 25 mm, that a stone tool is made from a
particular raw material and that rock art is concentrated in one area
but not another. Empirical observations and measurements therefore
constrain
and frame the viable hypotheses which may be adequately derived from
the data sets, although questions must always be asked as to why
certain criteria (observations and measurements) were applied in order
to prevent a degree of bias as far as possible.

Lack of understanding of 'the other', however, is something much
more basic and has a lot to do with how we see ourselves against
different cultural groups (usually based on ignorance). 'Others' are
usually created through myths which are created when there is
a lack of communication and/or when people fail to live up to our
cultural
expections.

In southern Africa, an excellent example can be seen in the first
interface between the Portuguese explorers to visit the Cape in the
15th century and the local people. Bartolomeu Dias, the first
European to sail round the southern-most tip of Africa, saw Khoikhoi
herdsmen when he made landfall at Mossel Bay in February 1488. The crew
of the caravel had been at sea since August the previous year and their
water had to have been pretty foul by the time they
reached the Cape south coast even
though they probably stopped at El Mina in Ghana to replenish their
supplies. The Portuguese just helped themselves to
water from the spring at Mossel Bay. The fact that they were able to do
so easily meant that there was a watering point kept open by the local
herdsmen to allow their animals to drink. In African herding societies,
the persons who look after the waterholes are seen as the 'owners', and
use by other people requires the good manners to ask permission (and
usually a gift). The Portuguese did try to offer gifts but these were
refused. The consequence was that the Khoikhoi threw stones at the
sailors from the bluff overlooking the spring, with Dias retaliating by
shooting one of the herdsmen dead with his crossbow. The first contact
between Europeans and South Africans was hardly auspicious, and the
Portuguese should have learned a lesson.

This was not the case. Francisco d'Almeida stopped
at the Cape to get water on his return to
Europe in 1510 after serving his term as Viceroy of India. It was an attempt to force the
local Khoikhoi to trade their cattle by kidnapping some children that
caused the anger of the local people this time. They retaliated by killing
d'Almeida and many of the young nobles who were with him. The Khoikhoi
thus gained a reputation of being fierce and warlike which caused the
Portuguese to avoid the Cape like the plague. It was not until
James Lancaster dropped anchor at Table Bay in 1591 that good relations
were made between Europeans and the Khoikhoi. Thus, a combination of
arrogance and bad manners based on ignorance created the conditions for
strife and the beginnings of the myths of the Khoikhoi who ultimately
became denigrated as some of the lowest human beings on Earth.

A different perspective of 'the other' can be seen in the use of
names among the aboriginal people of the Cape. The Khoikhoi (meaning
'Men of Men' or the 'Real People') used this collective name for
themselves. What this implied was that only people like themselves with
cattle could be regarded as being real men. The 'other' in this case
were the Sonqua (Soaqua=San or Bushmen), stockless people who stole
from the Khoikhoi. The Bushmen had no collective name for themselves;
the name San was thus a pejorative, a way of diminishing their status
in the eyes of the Khoikhoi.

The 'Other' as Savages

It is a common phenomenon that
there are usually people on the
periphery of the elite groups who are usually culturally different and
separate. Because they are of low social status, they are either
ignored, or seen as 'other' ('not us') and in consequence are usually
looked down upon. The irony is that such people, who are often hunters
or iron-workers in Africa, perform important functions for the larger
social network. When the Europeans first contacted the Khoikhoi at the
Cape they had to negotiate with them as equals for their cattle. Very
quickly, however, the inability of the Khoi to withstand the power of
merchant capital placed them in an inferior position, to such an extent
that they became synonymous with 'savages' in the European mind.

What does all this have to do with Archaeology? Just this:
almost all archaeologists working in the field of African Prehistory
are Western European/North American trained. This means they, just like
the first European travellers, look at people they study in the past
from their own cultural perspective. More important, this perspective
means that any description of the past tends to be in a European
'scientific' framework, which is only one possible vision of the past.
This leads to one of the greatest difficulties in archaeology, to get
into the minds of the people we are studying. All of which is
compounded by the fact that only a small fraction of the range of
cultural experience of past people survives in the archaeological
record. If living people have difficulty understanding each other (even
when they appear to speak the same language), how much more fraught
with problems will be archaeological interpretation.

Different Versions of the Past

Since each of us has different backgrounds, this will 'colour' how
we see things in the present and our experience with the past. For
example, people with an African rural heritage will probably have
different experiences and information than someone with an urban
background. A great deal of history is passed down
by oral tradition
among rural people . Among the Manding of Mali, for
example, there are
individuals, called griots, who are the repositories of their history.
These are a type of wandering minstrel who make up songs about events
and people, whose cultural memory goes as far back as Sundiata, the
founder of the Mali Empire in the 13th century. This is different from
the recording which takes place in diaries, books, newspapers, etc.
that organise peoples' memories within the urban setting. What is
obvious to anyone working with historical documents, however, is how
selective writers are about what they consider important enough to
write about. They may go into great detail about one aspect of events
happening around them, and totally ignore others. If we are aware,
then, that anything we read about of the past has been selectively
'filtered' by the observer, we must ask ourselves how objective can
this person have been? Some people are better observers and writers
than others, so the quality of the historical document is going to be
highly variable.

This is not just a trivial idea: any interpretation of the past is
just that - one variant of many, depending on the background, belief
system, political persuasion of the interpreter, and, of course, the
amount of data available. If each source has a different perspective
then we must assume that there are different reasons for writing about
the past. Thus, no vision of the past can be neutral. The task
of scholars is to try to critically evaluate the data sources to
identify and analyse these 'agendas'.

We all project our present onto the past, which should lead to the
question: which past? If there is more than one past, who owns these
different versions of the past?

Who Owns the Past?

I'm sure most of you never thought about the past as something you
could own but the different agendas about asking questions of the past
mean that they can be used for a variety of reasons. For example, there
is a strong political agenda behind the Israeli
interest in archaeology, and many interpretations are geared to the
question of legitimacy and land rights. If the Jews can show they have
been in the Levant for 5000 years, then they consider themselves to
have the greater claim to the land. Another example, from Australia, is
the current denial by aboriginal
people of exploitation of mineral resources by mining companies. The
aborigines claim that the land has spiritual value that is being
destroyed by mining. While this may be true, it is also a means whereby
the people can empower themselves against a (basically white European)
power structure which previously gave them few rights.

In South African history, the myth of the
colonisation of the land that was formerly promoted in Apartheid school
texts claimed Europeans and black farmers arrived in the Eastern Cape
at the same time. If this were the case, it would legitimise white
claims to the land. In fact, this has been a distortion of history used
to bolster such claims. Archaeology has shown that the summer rainfall
area of the Transkei was occupied by Iron Age farmers as far back as AD
640, and this probably extended at least as far west as the Kei and
Buffalo Rivers.

We might also target the modern Inkatha Freedom Party political
movement in South Africa, which stresses the history of the Zulu
'Nation', as another example. The leader of Inkatha, Dr Mangosuthu
Buthelezi, uses the historical sovereignty of the Zulu Nation with a
king and other cultural icons as the basis of his support. This is a
particular reading of the historical record, as the Kwazulu were one of
a number of 18th century Nguni chiefdoms. It was only with the
formation of the powerful Mthethwa confederacy under Dingiswayo, later
taken over by Shaka, that the name 'Zulu' was given any prominence.

Why should one person's past be more important than another's?
The answer is because one can manipulate the past and therefore one's
claims through
precedent. This means that the past has power, just as the
symbols of the past can be manipulated to sustain the image of that
power.

Reburial

There are moves by Native
Americans to
have the large
collection of Indian skeletons in various museums of the United States
returned to their descendents for reburial. Individual groups claim
that the skeletons were taken illegally, and without regard to Indian
religious beliefs, and have sat in drawers in museums for many years
without anything been done with them. Like the Australian example given
above, there is a great deal of truth to this, but it is also a
political move to demonstrate power over the government authorities
where this has long been denied. The reburial issue has other
ramifications. The loss of these large collections means that future
physical anthropologists interested in pathologies and disease among
Native Americans will have difficulty getting good samples for their
study. At the same time there is room for negotiation between the
different interest groups, and the entire exercise has been valuable.
It is now acknowledged that respect must be paid to these collections,
and the beliefs which may surround them. If any collections become
available, such as with the need to move graveyards due to
construction, etc., then the scientists should study the bones quickly,
and not let the skeletons lie around for years.

Ancestral graves are very important to African people who make less
distinction between the living and the dead than Europeans. The
ancestors are a direct link to the gods. and can be asked to intercede
on behalf of the living. Thus the graves can become shrines and are
important reference points in the landscape. In modern Ghana,
so important is the need for respect for the dead, a young man will go
into debt for most of his life lo make sure his parents have an
appropriate burial. He gains status by the size of the funeral and
assures that his spirit will not wander aimlessly when lie dies.

An Interactive Past

How can we reconcile them in
the present given
different versions of the past? One way is to weigh the
evidence and attempt an
interaction between past and present. This means clearly identifying
the biases of both the resources and data of the past, and those among
the observers in the present. Several questions can allow us to do
this: what were the people in the past describing and why? How did the
archaeological material accumulate (given different conditions of
preservation), and how complete is the archaeological record? What are
the observers in the present selecting and why? We are trying to see
if there is any skewing of the interpretation for political
correctedness or academic goals and ambition, personal ego trips, etc.

Not every interpretation is biased through overt or cynical
manipulation of the data. The scientific beliefs of any moment will
lend to cloud interpretation of the observer. since these are not
fixed. and there are always changing views of how the world is
organised. This is called a paradigm, and a paradigm shift occurs when
new data are framed within changing social conditions.

Examples of this with archaeological connections can be seen in the
Social Darwinism of the late 19th century. During this period Darwin's
idea of how evolution works by the survival of the fittest organisms
was manipulated and used to justify rampant capitalism and the rape of
the land by
unrestricted exploitation of natural resources and human labour. This
meant a colonial mentality in European colonies and America allowed the
chopping down of forests, digging huge holes in the ground for
minerals, and using humans as cheap labour all in the name of profit
for shareholders with little regard for the people doing the work.
Much of this was an extension of the class system that held European
people in their place and decreed that some individuals were better
than others so their innate abilities could be rewarded by using those
less capable, in particular 'natives' in the colonies who were regarded
as lower forms of humanity.

In the early 20th century, empire building and nationalism meant the
different European nations were vying with each other to extend their
trade networks. This fierce competition led to isolationism and
stereotyping of the worst kind (Frenchmen were called 'Frogs' because
they ate frog legs and Germans were called 'Huns' or barbarians). One
can
say that these were the conditions which led to expansionism of
neighbour against neighbour and the First World War. The outcome of
this, in. archaeological terms, was a scramble of another kind: to find
the oldest Europeans. Germany already had a strong case since
Neanderthal skulls had been found there in the previous century.
However a portion of skull, of size similar to present-day people, and
a
broken half of an ape-like jaw were found in association at Piltdown in
England in 1911. These were accepted by many members of the scientific
commuity
as representing the oldest human remains then known (a cross between a
large-brained human and a chimpanzee, or the proverbial missing link);
England could claim to have the oldest human. This
skull became more and more of a problem over time, especially after the
discovery
of Australopithecus africanus by Raymond Dart at Taung in the
northern
Cape in 1925 which showed a small brained individual with primitive
characteristics. It was not until 1953 that Kenneth Oakley was able to
show that the fluorine content of the Piltdown skull and the jaw was
different. The fluorine showed the skull was human but not very old and
that jaw
came from a modem oranutan; a radiocarnon date of 620 years was later
given. Both bones had been treated with potassium
bichromate to give them an old appearance. The Piltdown
hoax fooled many in the scientific community for years because of
the scientific paradigm when it was found, so it met preconceived ideas
of what an early human should look like.

A later scientific paradigm was to be found before and during the
Second World War. It was the belief that came out of 19th century
classifications of human types that some people were physically and
mentally superior to others. The view was heightened by the so-called
'Aryan myth' that the blond-haired, blue-eyed Teutons (Germanic
peoples) were the founders of the great civilisations and was used as
an excuse to rid Europe of 'inferior' people, namely gypsies,
homosexuals and ,especially, Jews in the Holocaust.

After the war, the world was split into two main camps: communist,
which looked for state control over the individual, and democratic,
which created the United Nations, and stressed individual rights that
could be effected by free-market economies. The latter was the same
ideological group that created the atom bomb. Today most of the
conflicts do not cross frontiers, but are
internal. In consequence there has been reluctance of the world at
large to interfere in 'sovereign' nations' affairs, so massive human
rights abuses have taken place. These ethnic conflicts underline the
ideology of separation which exists and how 'the other' is targetted.

Throughout the last century each stage, or paradigm, had the general
belief, or ideology, accepted, and more importantly, not questioned, by
most people which could be supported by studies selectively done by the
scientific community. Thus science, like history, is not neutral and
interpretations depend on the social mindset of the moment.

What is Archaeology?

Since the past is not neutral, this has implications for how
archaeology works. There are different ways that one can get
information about the past and this usually depends on what the
individual wants from it. As a student of the subject, you should
ask yourself why you want to do archaeology. For most people, a major
in archaeology is not a vocation, but comes purely from interest in the
past. and is usually combined with another major which overlaps, and
where job prospects are better, e.g. history, geography, geology, etc.
What a person chooses as a research area often comes out of the
teaching programme, and the need to find a research 'niche' to fill.
Thus the questions being asked about the past are created for many
different reasons.

Archaeology is what you make of it. It is not necessarily
only involved with the past either. Ethnoarchaeology, or the study of
living people to help interpret the past, is practised by a lot of
archaeologists, particularly where there is information that is being
lost by the encroachment of the outside world on traditional societies.

How you situate your project will determine what methods you use.
For example, you might need to look at archival records to
understand the
history of your target group if you want to know about people during the early colonial
period. You might also interview descendents of the
historical group to learn about their oral traditions. Information
prior to the advent of writing usually has to rely on material culture
residues, so you have to find sites that will possibly give you these
kind of data. This is not always a simple matter, especially if the
people have been marginalised for centuries by a more dominant culture.

Finding sites is a problem all on its own. Some sites can be found
easily
from surface indications, especially where this has been the result of
concentrated and repeated occupation over a long period. A good example
are shell middens on the coast. These are easily seen due to erosion on
sand dunes, although finding uneroded material may be more difficult.
Often a systematic survey is needed to locate the appropriate sites for
a project. This can involve walking across farm lands in a way that
each section gets covered. Once artefacts are located a rough count can
be made of the different materials, and a picture of site density and
occupation periods can emerge.

Having found the sites which should offer you information, you need
to work out how to best extract it. The traditional method used in
archaeology has been to excavate, but this may not be necessary, since
the reason you were probably able to identify the site in the first
place was from surface indications. This means what is on the surface
may have all the information you need, so you can describe the material
and map it to see if any pattern of the distribution across space
emerges. From this you might be able to identify activity areas where
people performed different tasks.

If excavation is necessary, then decisions have to be made about
where to dig. If nothing is known about the site a test excavation may
be done to work out the depth and stratigraphic sequence. How much
excavation is done from then on will depend on the interests of the
excavator. At the beginning of the century until the 1960s a culture
stratigraphic sequence looking at changes from level to level would
have driven the research design. Over the past three decades different
questions have been asked, although establishing a culture sequence
still may be the baseline study. Now spatial information might be
required to see, for example, if gender-specific task areas where men
and women did different things on the site can be identified.
Alternatively, it might be the economics of the target group that is of
interest, so faunal analysis (study of animal bones) might be important
to establish what people ate and how they got their food, or the season
of occupation of the site. We might also ask where the sources of raw
material for artefacts was, or possibly what exchange networks existed
to obtain exotic materials.

Any site that has been repeatedly re-occupied is usually going to be
an amalgam of different activities done by different age groupings and
genders over time. It is rare that an individual can be identified from
the residues that survive. Exceptions might be a cache of specific
items made by one person that show idiosyncratic traits, or a style of
rock painting or pottery making which is different from the other
examples in the area.

Logically all the older materials should be at the bottom of a
sequence, and the youngest at the top (only under certain
conditions does this get reversed). We can establish what is
known as a relative sequence. This means that the
material from the lower part of the sequence is relatively older than
that further up. It allows us to make some estimate of
differences that occurred through time. Using the concept of 'fashion',
we can say that the types of artifacts used from one level were those
which were culturally acceptable or fashionable at that moment in time.
These are known as fossiles directeurs (indicator or
marker fossils). If you find them on different sites you have good
reason to suspect that those levels from the sites were occupied at
roughly the same time, i.e. were contemporaneous.

We have to use different
methods if we want
to put absolute dates onto this sequence . People
developed calendars or king-lists with actual dates in years in the historical period in
different parts of the world.
It is therefore possible to relate material from a specific site to
period within
the calendar system in years BC (Before Christ, i.e. 2000 years ago).
Radiometric techniques, such as radiocarbon
dating or potassium-argon dating are more widely used today. The
principle behind both of these
methods is a decay factor of radioactive isotopes of carbon or
potassium.

Let us look in detail at how radiocarbon works. Carbon is the basic
building-block of organic material, which includes plants and animals.
An organism absorbs the unstable radioactive isotope
carbon-14 from the atmosphere while it is alive. It stops taking in
carbon-14 after death, when it begins to decay. Of
importance to us is the fact that this decay occurs
at a regular rate such that only half of the original
amount of carbon-14 remains after 5730 years; this is called the half
life. As
the amount of carbon-14 is proportional to the amount of time which has
passed since the organism died, we can calculate how long this was and
get a date in radiocarbon years, usually expressed as, for example,
3500 +/- 50 BP (Pta-4529) (3500 years Before Present with a standard
deviation of 50 years on either side + the laboratory sample number).
One of the more common materials found on archaeological sites is
charcoal from fires. This makes good dating material for the level from
which the charcoal came. A reasonable assumption is that everything
else in the level from which the dated charcoal came is the same age.

You can start to ask questions about political structures, and
how resources were used and controlled once you have obtained an
adequate amount of data from an adequate sample size. How were
the groups organised?
(small groupings or more centrally controlled larger groups?). What
were
the relationships between people practising different economies in the
area at the same time? We might also want to look at aspects of health,
so a study of any human skeletons might offer pathologies, population
dynamics (such as life expectancy). All this means that we do not just
look at things. The material culture is important but it needs to be
interpreted in a social sense.

Inevitably, the longer things are in the ground the greater the
chance of them being lost either by natural factors, such as erosion or
water transport, or by people building or ploughing the ground. The
parts that disappear fastest are the smelly bits, such as flesh or
skin, as well as plant remains (organic material). When you think about
all the artefacts made of leather, plant fibres, wood, etc. you will
realise how much is lost from most archaeological sites before the
researcher gets there. In some cases, however, the destruction of
organic remains is inhibited by desiccation (in very dry countries,
such as Egypt food remains still survive in tombs), or by water-logging
(in Denmark wholly preserved bodies of people have been found in
peat-bogs), or by freezing (in Russia tombs of Scythian horsemen have
been found with the people and their horses intact). Occasionally mud
slides will cover whole villages (at the Makah Indian village of Ozette
in the United States wooden boxes and basketry have been found).
Volcanic ash is another preservative (after Mt. Vesuvius blew up in AD
79 it covered the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum smothering the
inhabitants and preserving the towns intact). Another area where
preservation can be remarkable is underwater. Water-logged wood lasts a
long time, as long as there are no wood-boring creatures around. In
very cold waters, such as the Great Lakes of North America whole boats
have been preserved. In the Engish Channel, the Mary Rose, Henry
VIII's flagship, which sank on its maiden voyage in the 16th century,
was half buried in silts on the sea bottom. This prevented wood-borers
getting to the wood, so half the ship has survived and been brought to
the surface.

The scope of archaeology is almost unlimited. Virtually any
discipline can be involved, whether it be medicine, physics, chemistry
or philosophy and psychology. This is because archaeology is concerned
with the entire range of the human experience. Experimental archaeology
can require the help of engineering students to work out how materials
were moved from place to place, and into position in construction. It
is estimated, for example, that three million cubic metres of stone had
to be quarried and moved into place in the construction of the Great
Pyramid of Cheops (approximately 2.3 million limestone blocks weighing
between 2.5 and 15 tonnes, built over a period of 23 years). While the
sheer size is impressive, we must ask ourselves about the social
conditions of building. How was labour organised, and how could the
large number of people needed for such elaborate construction be
adequately fed to maintain the necessary strength to move large blocks
of stone by manual labour?

It is only over the past 30-something years that archaeology become
aware of the potential
symbolic importance of artefacts to humans. The tendency in the past
was to assume only functional use of items, except in cases where
religious or ceremonial activities could be recognised. Today we know
that even the most prosaic of items from a site could have different
uses and meanings depending on the person who was using them and under
differing conditions. A simple example can be seen in the use of
porcelain dishes found at the Cape. These were imported as functional
items from which to eat or drink during the 18th and 19th centuries
. At
the same time whole sets could be displayed on special racks in a house
as a form of decoration and status. Sometimes individual pieces might
be obtained by slaves or servants, particlularly after they were
chipped and discarded by the original owner.

Another ceramic example can be seen in the large amounts of pottery
found on Khoikhoi herder sites in the Western Cape of South Africa. So
many pots were used by these people that up to 700 broken potsherds can
be found per cubic metre of excavated earth in some sites. By contrast,
in smaller rockshelters occupied by hunting people in the area, only
ten potsherds per cubic metre are found, and when the rim sherds are
compared we find that each rim piece came from a different pot. It
would seem that the hunters were not using whole pots, but collecting
broken pieces. We are not sure why this should have been the case, but
one suggestion is that the pieces were used as symbolic items or for
divining. A clue to this comes from the Bushman stories collected in
the 19th century where containers, such as bags or quivers, have power
and often come to life. It is possible that the potsherds were symbolic
containers which were also believed to have power. The conditions under
which an archaeologist finds such items
may range from the functional through to the symbolic and have been
used by the wealthy as well as the lowest strata in the society.

It should be apparent by now that there are different explanations
possible
in the interpretation of archaeological materials. Which explanation is
chosen will depend on the theoretical position of the archaeologist. No
explanation, however, exists in a vacuum. It usually depends on the
archaeological paradigm, i.e. the world view of the scientific beliefs,
and is built up from preceding ideas and data.Here is where we find the
problem of the 'lunatic fringe'. Because
anyone can make up his or her own explanation about the past, many
people think that they can do it simply based on their own experiences
and beliefs. This is how ideas of extra-terrestrial involvement in
creating the huge sculptures of Easter Island, or the land pictures of
South America are developed. Such beliefs can be not only
anti-intellectual, such as the refusal to acknowledge the importance of
evolutionary theory in human development, but can be out-and-out
racist, as was the firm belief by white colonists of Rhodesia
(modern-day Zimbabwe) that Great Zimbabwe was built by Phoenicians and
not the ancestors of the modem Shona.

What many people do not realize is that it takes four years to become a
qualified archaeologist (3 years undergraduate degree + Honours in
South Africa) and
a minimum of another degree to be hired by museums or universities. The
reason for this is that it takes time not only to learn about the wide
range of archaeological method and theory of how people in various
parts of the world through time lived their lives but also to be able
to critically evaluate the data.